Drabbles: Pas de Caractère
by nebroadwe
Summary: Character drabbles featuring various personages from Princess Tutu. Dedicated to Laurie, the Fullmetal Analyst: 'True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.'
1. Mytho: Rebirth

_Mytho's body remembers what his heart cannot ..._

* * *

His body remembers movement, so he moves.

With thoughtless grace he mimics the patterns he encounters -- rising with the sun, turning flower-faced through the day, sinking to rest at dusk, sheets shrouding his limbs like clouds. He finishes nothing but to begin again. Smooth as an egg, the world is incidental to him, inconsiderable, until it shivers and wobbles, ticking erratically as an ill-made watch, bumping and lurching toward the nest's edge ...

His body remembers movement, so he moves to cup the egg in his hands as it fractures, wondering at the sudden quickening of his own breath.


	2. Fakir: Whisper Who Dares

_"I praise the Frenchman, his remark was shrewd -- / 'How sweet, how passing sweet, is solitude!'  
But grant me still a friend in my retreat / Whom I may whisper, 'Solitude is sweet.'" -- William Cowper_

* * *

He walks in a circle of silence bounded by whispers. Once they were meant to be overheard: admiring, envious, laced with _look-at-me-oh-no-DON'T!_ giggles. But now ... now he's discovering how much easier it is not to give a damn what people think of you when they consider you mysterious and aloof rather than unpredictable and vicious. 

Only one person crosses the circle as if it doesn't exist, tripping up to him without regard for his reputation -- or his privacy. He listens for her step, ready to give her alone a piece of his mind.


	3. Lilié: Tea and Sympathy

_Blood does not always tell ..._

* * *

She wakes each morning to the glorious certainty that man is at the mercy of the gods, his end inevitable from his beginning. Her friends are pawns of fate, blind as Oedipus to what awaits them, and she their only comforter. Brewing tempests in teacups, she pours forth angst and sympathy in less than equal measure, the bitter whelming the sweet. All the world's a stage to her, the play a Gothic melodrama endlessly repeating its second act.

She is Drosselmayer's true heir, did she but know it. Well for her friends (and for the world) that she does not**.  
**

* * *

**Author's Note:** _I would be remiss if I did not credit the American playwright Lillian Hellman for the phrases with which Lilié's "glorious certainty" is at first described. Quotation is the sincerest form of flattery._


	4. Kraehe: Original Sin

_"Alas! our young affections run to waste / Or water but the desert."__ -- Byron  
_

* * *

_Once a king decreed that his seven sons wed his brother's seven daughters. The unwilling maidens' father gave each daughter the bride-gift of a dagger, and on their wedding night six of the maidens stabbed their sleeping grooms. When the seventh prince awoke alive, he slew his uncle and cousins for their crime. The father's spirit thereafter suffered an unslakable thirst, while his daughters fruitlessly offered him water in sieves ... _

Kraehe closes the book and pillows her head on its blind-stamped cover, wondering what sin she has committed that she cannot bring her father the relief he craves**.  
**

* * *

**Author's Note:** _The reader familiar with classical mythology will recognize in this story elements from the tale of the Danaides. "Blind-stamping" is a method of book decoration that impresses a pattern in the leather or cloth of the cover but does not fill it with gold or color._


	5. Autor: Jackdaw

_"I have vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals." -- William Goldman_

* * *

He haunts Goldkrone's secondhand shops, almost a byword for oddball acquisitiveness. The merchants of Nikolausstrasse call him (not quite behind his back) _Herr Dohle_, but as long as they take his money, he ignores their jibes. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Who tells gold from lead by weight alone?

Books he buys to disbind, teasing manuscript fragments from backstrips and linings, searching for overlooked words. But those teacups, that inkwell: them he touches sparingly, lovingly, for history fills them as full as he expects to brim with power, once his knowledge is complete.**  
**

* * *

**Author's Note:** Dohle _is the German word for jackdaw, a member of the crow family proverbial for snapping up unconsidered trifles; _Sankt Nikolaus_ (Saint Nicholas) is the patron of pawnbrokers as well as of children. The saying about the one-eyed man's advantage among the blind is usually attributed to the Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus. And it was long customary for bookbinders to use scraps of old manuscripts in the bindings of new books; some fragmentary pieces of medieval literature have been recovered by dissecting later tomes, to the subdued joy of my colleagues in paleography._


	6. Piqué: Gloriously Ever After

_"Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul ... " -- Emily Dickinson_

* * *

Her days are full: from cockcrow to curfew she studies, chats, laughs and practices, practices, practices. Her ambition has grown like climbing ivy: she longs to dance Aurora or Coppélia and hear applause in foreign accents. The dream's so strong it empties her sometimes; she reaches out and finds only the barre to grasp -- no friendly hand, no cheerful voice, only stumbling inadequacy and pain.

But other times that vacancy seems a promise: the quiet before the overture, the blank page on which to write a happy ending. Then she raises one arm _en haut_ and chassés into the future.


	7. Fakir: Pas Seul

_"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale." -- D. H. Lawrence_

* * *

He's an inspired soloist, challenging his seniors for featured roles, but to be king of the variations is to be damned with faint praise and he knows it. Impatient to improve, he wishes his teacher wouldn't pair him with his fellow beginners, who titter and trip no matter what he does. His support becomes assertion: he pulls each hesitant girl into the proper attitudes, hurrying her tardy feet across the floor. "Enough!" the teacher exclaims, one ear flicking impatiently. "Before you partner another, you must learn to trust yourself. Sit!"

He sits, brows lowered, disdaining comfort and concealing his confusion.


	8. Raetsel: Helpmeet

_Where love and need are one ... ?_

* * *

Raetsel's house overflows with family; her visits to Charon's smithy go unmarked at first in the bustle. She's pleased to find somewhere her help is needed and noted -- Fakir demanding seconds, Charon complimenting her mending. Her mother sighs over such charity, but everyone else approves (_those poor children, that dear man_), so she's there to console and restrain Fakir while Charon butters Mytho's burns.

They give the boys a moment alone together afterward. Standing beside her in the hall, Charon sighs and smiles wearily. _Thank you, Raetsel._

His hand finds support on her shoulder and she loves him for it.**  
**

* * *

**Author's Note:** _Current first-aid for burns advises strongly against using butter on them. In the past, however, this treatment was a standard folk-remedy._


	9. Mytho: Home Is Where the Heart Is

_"Love is whatever you can still betray." -- John Le Carré_

* * *

He stands upon the doorstep, in the shadow of the weathered signboard, listening. The bellows' wheeze, the forge's roar, the hammer's ring -- louder than all these in his ears is the beat of a magnanimous heart. It's always been his for the asking; he just never had the words before: _You gave me a home; now give me -- _

"No!"

By the time the door opens and Charon calls, "Mytho?" he's dragged his body around the corner, fighting his sinews for every step. He bites his tongue to prevent it from answering, tasting blood sweet as desire and bitter as shame.


End file.
